Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business and the World

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Blockchain Revolution by Don and Alex Tapscott, read by John Chancer - the first audiobook to explain why blockchain technology will fundamentally change our lives. Blockchain is the ingeniously simple technology that powers Bitcoin. But it is much more than that, too. It is a public ledger to which everyone has access but which no single person controls. It allows for companies and individuals to collaborate with an unprecedented degree of transparency.

Sapiens

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us sapiens? In this bold and provocative audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, PostCapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change and how we can build a more equal society. Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself has reached its limits.

The Wealth of Nations

The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy,
The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.

Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

Chances are you know a person between the ages of 11 and 30. You've seen them doing five things at once: texting friends, downloading music, uploading videos, watching a movie on a two-inch screen, and doing who-knows-what on Facebook or MySpace. They're the first generation to have literally grown up digital - and they're part of a global cultural phenomenon that's here to stay.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World

The New York Times best-selling author examines how people can drive creative, moral and organisational progress - and how leaders can encourage originality in their organisations. How can we originate new ideas, policies and practices without risking it all? Adam Grant shows how to improve the world by championing novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battling conformity and bucking outdated traditions.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have. The new opportunity is that it's easier than ever to find, organize, and lead a tribe. The Web has enabled an explosion of all kinds of tribes - and created shortage of people to lead them. This is the growth industry of our time. Tribes will help you understand exactly what's at stake, and why YOU can and should lead a tribe of your own.

Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You

Don't fight for customers; let them fight over you! Have you ever queued for a restaurant? Preordered something months in advance? Fought for tickets that sell out in a day? Had a hairdresser with a six-month waiting list? There are people who don't chase clients; clients chase them. In a world of endless choices, why does this happen? Why do people queue up? Why do they pay more? Why will they book months in advance? Why are these people and products in such high demand?

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Int'l Edit.)

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over? People like Martin Luther King, Jr.; Steve Jobs; and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. Their natural ability to start with why enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say yes - and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His 35 years of rigorous, evidence-based research, along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior, has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader - and how to defend yourself against them.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's fascinating and humorous quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: 25th Anniversary Edition

Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers - those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

The Everything Store

Winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To achieve that end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now...

The Founder's Dilemmas

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

In this groundbreaking audiobook,
New York Times best-selling author Steven Kotler decodes the mystery of ultimate human performance. Drawing on over a decade of research and first-hand reporting with dozens of top action and adventure sports athletes like big wave legend Laird Hamilton, big mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones, and skateboarding pioneer Danny Way, Kotler explores the frontier science of “flow”, an optimal state of consciousness in which we perform and feel our best.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum on how the impending technological revolution will change our lives. We are on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And this one will be unlike any other in human history. Characterized by new technologies fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will impact all disciplines, economies and industries - and it will do so at an unprecedented rate.

David and Goliath

David and Goliath is the dazzling and provocative new book from Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw. Why do underdogs succeed so much more than we expect? How do the weak outsmart the strong? In David and Goliath Malcolm Gladwell takes us on a scintillating and surprising journey through the hidden dynamics that shape the balance of power between the small and the mighty.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety; these notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the best-selling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.

The FINTECH Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries

A front-line industry insider's look at the financial technology explosion. The FINTECH Book is your primary guide to the financial technology revolution, and the disruption, innovation, and opportunity therein. Written by prominent thought leaders in the global fintech investment space, this book aggregates diverse industry expertise into a single informative volume to provide entrepreneurs, bankers, and investors with the answers they need to capitalize on this lucrative market.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup--practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms

Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another group of customers. Economists call matchmakers multisided platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same for drivers and riders.

Publisher's Summary

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration in a meeting room, on a conference call, and even in a convention center has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the burgeoning growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the 21st century.

Based on a $9-million research project led by best-selling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing genomes, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles. You'll read about:

Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc., CEO who used open-source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.

Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.

Mature companies, like Procter & Gamble, that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.

An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the 21st century.

This book contains some interesting concepts to which I was happy to be introduced and some great stories, mostly from the worlds of business and academia, that illustrate and flesh out the concepts. It is also, unfortunately, tedious and repetitive. A good editor could shorten it by half and vastly improve it by doing so.

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

Amazon Customer

Los Angeles, CA USA

22/05/08

Overall

"Wikinomics"

The content of the book is excellent, especially for executives not really clued into the wikiness of the tech world. But the narrator, who has a beautiful and strong speaking voice, is so forceful with every sentence, one would think the book is a series of proclamations on how wiki will save the world. As a result the book's message and content began to seem redundant after Chapter 2. Less would have been more in this case.

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

Dan

Fairfax, VA, USA

14/05/07

Overall

"sadly, a disappointment"

I was expecting a lot more from this book. If you're looking for something insightful and interesting to listen to, I would suggest either "Freakonomics" or "The World is Flat".

"Wikinomics" blathers on and on about an open-source revolution, and companies that do not embrace the open-source movement will ultimately lose out. I personally would like to believe this, and perhaps there is evidence to really support this general claim, but you will not find it in this book. The author does point out wikipedia and linux and a few other success stories, but these are already very well documented; the author would have you believe he's really pulling back the curtains to show you a world out there that people don't already know about.

The narrator isn't the best, but even an amazing narrator couldn't make this book interesting. The tone of the book is often preachy. This author will not keep your interest beyond the opening passage. A very dull and uninspired book.

9 of 10 people found this review helpful

Rob

Ottawa, ON, Canada

03/05/07

Overall

"Nothing new here"

Absolutely nothing new here. Tapscott seems to wait for the latest trends to pass and then writes about them as if they are new. If you've heard of Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, you already know what's in this book.

6 of 7 people found this review helpful

"ktreanor"

14/06/07

Overall

"Not as good as expected"

I heard the author speak at a conference recently and he was/is a super speaker, but this book.....

I am half way through the book now and am finding it a bit slow and heavy on words and opinions but light on examples and cases. There's certainly some good stuff in the material, I was just expecting more.

5 of 6 people found this review helpful

Tom G

Montreal, Canada

29/01/09

Overall

"This book is now outdated"

I purchased this book, as well as Crowdsourcing, the latter of which is the much of the same subject matter, but from 2008, instead of 2007.

The narrator of Crowdsourcing is also much better, with the Wikinomics narrator sounding like he had to take smoke break every 10 minutes, having the raspy voice of a 60 year old chain smoker. Not exactly the sound of a young technology writer. His emphasis when reading is also so measured, it sounds like he's narrating a 1960s PBS documentary. He has no relationship to the material: he actually almost breaks into laughter as he says "Web 2.0".

Buy Crowdsourcing instead.

7 of 9 people found this review helpful

Mark

Jonesboro, LA, United States

02/07/07

Overall

"Wikinonsense"

It explores how some companies in the early 21st century used mass collaboration (or peer production) and open-source technology such as wikis to be successful. According to Tapscott wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The use of mass collaboration in a business environment, in recent history, can be seen as an extension of the trend in business to outsource: externalize formerly internal business functions to other business entities. The difference however is that instead of an organized business body brought into being specifically for a unique function, mass collaboration relies on free individual agents to come together and cooperate to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This kind of outsourcing is also referred as crowdsourcing, to reflect this difference. This can be incentivized by a reward system, though it is not required.

While, there are some interesting examples and some valuable insights, the book is far from being a critical study. Even when it is insightful, it is like listening to people smoking pot. Every idea is clever as long as nobody is sober.

The section on Sharing is toothless in examining the implications of the loss of property rights. Real companies should be real careful about drinking this exuberant koolaid. But don't take any of it too seriously - if the authors believed what they were saying, then why didn't they just blog the book for free and make money from "incentives"?

In fact, here is a Godelian puzzle to ponder:
The last chapter will be written by viewers, and was opened for editing on February 5, 2007. So, if the authors truly believed what they are saying in the first chapters that are not open for editing, then why wouldn't they let the wisdom of the crowd edit the first part as well?

If you are going to read this, then please also read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

By the way, the first paragraph of my review was lifted from wikipedia.

7 of 9 people found this review helpful

Kenneth

LEESBURG, VA, United States

07/11/07

Overall

"Ra Ra, but Where’s the Beef"

The book looks at Wikipedia and a cluster of other very recent open source success as though this were a wild new idea with little or no precedence. The result is almost propagandistic.

A longer term perspective that looked at GNU (a precursor to Linux from the early ‘80s) and professional societies (a very early kind of open sourcing) would have revealed more weighty questions. Most open-source movements have largely failed, especially in computing. Even Linux is starting to seriously lag the state of the art. Reading this book creates the opposite impression.

Wikipedia is amazing; it is changing the world. But why? And will it last? Is it representative? Is it even the right story or is the destruction of Britannica the important story?

I suspect that in the future open source will be primarily a tool that businesses use to compete with each other, with results that are as often destructive as creative. But this book doesn’t even create a framework for discussing this possibility.

7 of 10 people found this review helpful

Steven Bowles

Newmarket Ontario

19/04/07

Overall

"Awesome!"

Thought provoking.. One of the most eye opening technology books out there! Don’t let the name of put you off .. I thought I understood the internet , well I now have an understanding of true collaboration in the globe market .. If you have enjoyed books like : The world is flat or the Innovators Solution or What’s Next . This book will help pull it all together..
Awesome
Steve

3 of 4 people found this review helpful

Wesley

Burnt Hills, NY, USA

31/01/09

Overall

"Boring"

In the future, people (mainly youngsters) and forward-looking corporations will collaborate and accomplish amazing things. There, I just saved you 13 hours of listening to this book. Talk about having one idea and beating it to death over and over and over. Also, the narrator uses the same inflection for every single sentence he reads making it just that much more painful to listen to. My advice: skip this book.

4 of 6 people found this review helpful

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